This was during the first day of my first real dev job, straight out of college. I didn’t have have much experience with version control since I did mostly solo projects in college, and I wasn’t exposed to SVN or Git in school at all.

One of the senior devs was going to give me and another new guy a brief overview of the codebase. He sets us up with the GitHub repo for the codebase and tells us to clone the codebase locally. I didn’t really know what this meant but I felt kind of embarrassed to ask, so I just clicked “download as zip” on The GitHub repo.

After a minute he saw what I had done and was like “yeah, that’s not what you want to do” and showed me how to clone it. I was kind of embarrassed but I learned Git pretty quickly after that.

I don’t really have a moral to this story except that “no question is a stupid one” is much easier said than done for many people, and it can be embarrassing to ask certain questions sometimes.

GF: I'm unable to undo my zip, help
Me: ctrl Z
GF: what!
Me: what? Oh.

(She left me the week after :'| )

Happy April Fool's!

- Windows 8 == Best OS
- Apple is fairly priced
- PHP > C++
- Java === JavaScript
- facebook > devrant
- Github useless, use .zip
- Comic Sans best terminal font
- Nobody needs a web developer because Wordpress much better
- Linux is for virgins

A trusted-partner of my company obviously opened a dodgy email, as some of my co-workers got emails with a dodgy link from them....

So our Network Admin sent an email to the entire company with a screenshot of the email and a message along the lines of "DO NOT CLICK THE LINK IF YOU'VE RECEIVED THE ORIGINAL EMAIL!"

Company director REPLIES TO ALL and says 'i cant click the link that you sent to us'.
N.A replies directly to him to say its only a screenshot as it could spread a virus.

Director then informs N.A that that he has found the original mail (hurrah!) but the link downloaded an empty .zip file, so he forwarded the file to another director... who also couldn't open.... so they forwarded it to another person who also couldn't open it..... and they in turn forwarded it etc etc.

Currently have 37 power scans running (out of 250 computers) and trying to figure out how the hell these people manage to dress themselves every morning.

Final.zip
Final1.zip
Finalfinal.zip
final.v1.zip
Final.v2.zip

Project folder without git

Wait. Say what Google Chrome? I can't use the .zip extension? Instead I have to use the .zip extension? What?

Junior trying to avoid git by saying :

'With today's ram and storage size, it's faster to clone a folder and zip it'

Fuck!

The website i made has been hacked today.

Stored in their server.

They didnt give me an access for it.

The user account in the cms i used for updating content while building the website was revoked when the website is completed.

Now they ask me for the latest backup.

I have no backup because how the hell i do a backup when i got no access to the cpanel.

The only backup is the zip file for initial uploading into their server and the contents were added after the website is on their server.

That goddamn IT guy who wont give me any access for “securty sake” is calling me furiously asking for the backup and how to set up the stuffs from the beginning.

I thought he was the one who know his shit but i was wrong.

Fuck me?

No.

Fuck you.

But i still responding to him telling him step by step how to do shit with some swearing and sarcasm.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR SHITS, MATE

Explaining win zip to a client!

So I was asked to help migrate an application to AWS, asked for the codebase. Received a GitHub link in my mail (Usually is a zip file). Satisfied I open the link to see a repo with a hundred zip files time-stamped with version numbers

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Fucking fuck fuck fucker fucking fuck

What a dumbass guy seriously. I have this colleague in my office who refuses to create a new branch because that will "ruin the single straight line". Are you seriously fucking kidding me??? The noobest guy ever doesnt know a third git command other than pulling and committing fucking nonsense. Why use git then? Just go back to creating zip files are maintain code. Fuck that guy too who hired him and now because of this fucking asshole I am not able to carry on my work.

Such so-called "developers" should be strapped to the back of a horse and the horse made to run on a gravel road for fuck's sake.. Fuck you man 🖕

!dev
Just found out my house's heating system relies on this. A button, being held down by a bolt held by a zip tie. Who in their right mind looked at this, was like "this is fine" and left it there.
My dad, apparently.

Yah.....!!

API Guy.

He has a serious regex problem.
Regexes are never easy to read, but the ones he uses just take the cake. They're either blatantly wrong, or totally over-engineered garbage that somehow still lacks basic functionality. I think "garbage" here is a little too nice, since you can tell what garbage actually is/was without studying it for five minutes.

In lieu of an actual rant (mostly because I'm overworked), I'll just leave a few samples here. I recommend readying some bleach before you continue reading.

Not a valid url name regex:
VALID_URL_NAME_REGEX = /\A[\w\-]+\Z/

Semi-decent email regex: (by far the best of the four)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

Over-engineered mess that only works for (most) US numbers:
VALID_PHONE_REGEX = /1?\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-8][0-9])\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-9]{2})\s*\W?\s*([0-9]{4})(\se?x?t?(\d*))?/

and for the grand finale:

ZIP_CODE_REGEX = /(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{1} *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$)|GIR[ ]?0AA|((AB|AL|B|BA|BB|BD|BH|BL|BN|BR|BS|BT|CA|CB|CF|CH|CM|CO|CR|CT|CV|CW|DA|DD|DE|DG|DH|DL|DN|DT|DY|E|EC|EH|EN|EX|FK|FY|G|GL|GY|GU|HA|HD|HG|HP|HR|HS|HU|HX|IG|IM|IP|IV|JE|KA|KT|KW|KY|L|LA|LD|LE|LL|LN|LS|LU|M|ME|MK|ML|N|NE|NG|NN|NP|NR|NW|OL|OX|PA|PE|PH|PL|PO|PR|RG|RH|RM|S|SA|SE|SG|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SP|SR|SS|ST|SW|SY|TA|TD|TF|TN|TQ|TR|TS|TW|UB|W|WA|WC|WD|WF|WN|WR|WS|WV|YO|ZE)(\d[\dA-Z]?[ ]?\d[ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}))|BFPO[ ]?\d{1,4}/

^ which, by the way, doesn't match e.g. Australian zip codes. That cost us quite a few sales. And yes, that is 512 characters long.

Got to learn Shopware (the eCommerce thingy written in PHP) for the job.

Bought a book worth ~60$.

The author writes: "Use vagrant it's soooooo comfy and cozy and everything!".

Sure, why not.

Got to get online over my smartphone.

Cloned the repo with the Vagrantfile.

Did a 'vagrant up'.

Downloaded the Ubuntu box of around 1.5 GB (reminder: over my smartphone which has around 3 GB 'highspeed' internet connection).

Vagrant initialized and provisioned the box.

Error.

Error?

Error.

VT-X is not enabled. Hm. Strange. Wait...when it's not enabled, can it be that...

Yep.

THIS SHITTY LAPTOP SCHMAPTOP DOES NOT SUPPORT VT-X AND I PULVERIZED JUST THE HALF OF MY INTERNET DATA FOR THIS SHITTY BOX IN ORDER TO JUST DOWNLOAD THE ZIP FILE AND INSTALL IT OLDSCHOOL-SCHMOLDSCHOOL INSTALL A APACHE VIRTUAL HOST.

Time for new hardware I think.

When you use a PC to open a zip file made on a Mac

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

The day i found out how GitHub and Git actually work and how easy it is to manage versions rather than having a zip archive in Dropbox. I grew up so fast...T_T

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

I'm sick of how much abuse PHP gets from other programming communities. PHP written well, using PHP 7 is comparatively quick. yes it has its quirks, just like JavaScript, but just because you can do stuff in multiple ways, and the language has a few inconsistencies doesn't make it a bad language. The recursive flag in bash applications changes case inconsistently (I.e. zip and cp) but that doesn't get bashed (lol) half as much....

I think I need to finish my coffee this morning

I gave him the GitHub repo link for download. He doesn't know how to download it.

// I probably should have sent the zip folder through mail or use Google drive 😐

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it
Trash it, change it, mail - upgrade it
Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it
Snap it, work it, quick - erase it
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it
Load it, check it, quick - rewrite it
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it
Drag and drop it, zip - unzip it
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it
View it, code it, jam - unlock it
Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it
Cross it, crack it, switch - update it
Name it, rate it, tune it, print it
Scan it, send it, fax - rename it
Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it
Turn it, leave it, start - format it

FUCK YOU PHP!!!! FUCKING HELL JUST FUCK THE HELL OFF YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
8 GOD FORSAKEN HOURS SPENT TRYING TO ZIP SOME SHITTY FUCKING FILES IN A FOLDER ON MY WEB SERVER TO HAVE THEM DOWNLOADED TO MY CLIENT COMPUTER.... 8 HOURS UNABLE TO OPEN THE DAMN FILE AND THE ISSUE WAS "echo" & "print_r()" STATEMENTS GETTING TRAPPED IN MY ZIPARCHIVE BUFFER MAKING THE ZIP FILE A GIANT PILE OF UNREADABLE SHIT.
HOW IN GODS NAME WERE THOSE FUCKERS EVEN BEING ADDED TO THE ZIP FILE.

Fucking hell. Time to sleep.

I don't get why people are still using WinRAR. I discovered 7-zip years ago and while it's very minimalistic, open source and ad-free (also without any annoying "buy me now" shit), there has never been an archive I couldn't open using it.

I'm not angry, mostly sad.

At my workplace we don't use git.
There are constant overwriting, sending code via email or USB stick and forgetting passwords to zip-files shenanigans going on.

I already use git for all my local projects (literally git init in the directory) but my coworker and I thought that it would be a great idea to have a local server with a Gitlab running on it.
So I started looking into running a self-hosted Gitlab (for about 15 minutes) and then our boss who was sitting right next to me almost shouted at us: "Such stuff should be coordinated with the boss! We don't just do something and burn my money because it's _cool_!"

No, git is not cool, it's necessary for crying out loud! Gitlab is cool but at the end of the day also just another tool too.

I guess I have some persuasion to do.

I don't know what version control has done to our boss that he has such a deep dislike for it.

A is for Assembly, a wizard's spell

B is for Bootstrap, so bland and the same. And also for Brainf*ck, will blow you away

C is for COBOL, your grandad knows that

D is for daemon, your server knows what

E is for Express.js, you node what is coming

F is for FORTRAN, which is perferct for sciencing

G is for GNU which is GNU not UNIX

H is for Haskell using functional units

I is for Intance, An action of Object

J is for Java plays with them Always

K is for Kotlin, Android's new toy

L is for Lisp, scheming a ploy

M is for Matlab, who knows how it works

N is for Node a bloatware of code

O is for Objective Pascal, you did not expect that

P is for programming, we all love to do that

Q is for Queries, A database is made

R is for R, statistics are great

S is for Selenium, you have to test that

S is for Smalltalk, let's make it all brief

T is for Turing Test, how human is this?

U is for Unix, build with all talents

V is for Visual Studio, built with all laments

W is for Web, lets build something cool

X is for XHTML, remember all that?

Y is for Y2K, I'm tired as f*ck

Z is for Zip, let's zip is all now.

Get yourself coffee and back to the grind.

*my first day on the job to work on a website used by dozens of companies worldwide and 1000s of users*

me: So where can I find the git repository?
dev: Git?
me: Uh... what kind of source control do you use?
dev: We don't use anything fancy like that.
me: *freaking out a little, I already committed to this job*
me: So then where do you edit your code and how do you back it up?
dev: Oh, I just edit it on FTP and zip all the code every week.

Just joined a new job. Got into a team of 10+ devs working on one code base. Its spread across many cities and few devs sit together.

They've been versioning their code by mailing each other .zip files of the entire 400MB code base at the end of each day.

Me: Can we have git or svn please?
Manager: SVN? Don't worry about that now, we'll get SVN when the project is finished.

Managed to get an SVN repo running after 2 weeks. FML.

Today, I was telling a team member who joined recently to refer a GitHub repo, fork it and start working.

That person asks me, "Why GitHub, why should I access it etc". I blanked out after hearing the first question, so whatever said after that wasn't registered in my mind.

I asked that person "how did you do it in your previous org ?"

The response was, "we zip the code at end of everyday and store it as draft in our mailbox"

I stormed out of the workplace, even though it was just around mid of the day...

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
Trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it,
Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it,
Snap it, work it, quick, erase it,
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick, rewrite it
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag and drop it, zip, unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, curl it, find it,
View it, code it, jam, unlock it
Surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it
Cross it, crack it, twitch, update it,
Name it, read it, tune it, print it,
Scan it, send it, fax, rename it,
Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it,
Turn it, leave it, stop, format it.

Zip me, unzip me

A guy wanted me to convert his Unity project from Android to ios.

He was offering less than 50$....

It dosent end here....

He sent me the files in a zip on Google Drive.....

Also the project size was around 3 gb......

😢😢

root@gf # date; mv gf $HOME; watch movies; touch; split; finger; unzip; fsck; touch; fsck; yes; yes; fallocate -l20M "cream"; zip; sleep

Happy Valentine's Day everyone 😉

One component is used over 30,000 times. How many unit tests do you think we have for it? Zero. Fucking zero, Zip, Zilch, Nada, None.

WHAT THE QA FUCK!?

Spotify just asked me for my ZIP code (to verify my family plan again after like a year).

I typed 00000 and they accepted that 🤔

Zip up their entire program, then upload it to git.

C++ is a beautiful programming language

((foo<bar>)*(g++)).baz(!&qux::zip->ding());

-made a password-protected zip to backup my homedir
-launch the update to Fedora 28
-oh look Jessica Jones season 2 is available on Netflix

...

Some hours later

-Fedora 28 boots
-copy back my backup.zip
-shit what's the password already
-proceed to bruteforce the zip
-let's go back to Netflix while it's doing the job

...

Some hours later

-password: test
-proceed to self-fuck

A client obsessed with *security* won’t give us access to the server that hosts the website we built.

Code release involves building templates, compressing the changed files into a zip folder, and emailing them to the client with instructions on where the changed files go

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

A story before the start of another week,

So last Friday, one of the business guy came over and asked a rather peculiar request, the conversation went like this,

"" -> business guy
// -> me/colleague

"Can you export the code from the repo?"

//uhh, sorry, what?

"Yeah, can you export, the code, from the repo? The latest one?"

//as in the code? You're asking for the source code?

"Yep, that's the one"

//oookay..., what is the purpose of that? What are you going to do with it?

"Nothing, just so that we have it"

//well, we do have it, stored securely in the repo

"Yeah but we need the code, as, you know, physically? not the one in the repo, we want to kinda have another copy for ourselves, just put it in a zip or something"

//again, we already have it stored in the repo, what do you need another copy for?

"Ahhh, you know, just that we know that we have some kind of proof of the state of the progress... of the feature (insert hand gesture) that we're working on, so that we know that we have reached... this... far, or something like that"

//that's what the versions are for, we can always rollback to whichever... past... state (insert hand gesture) that we have done and/or doing, everything is there in the repo,

"Uhhh, it's not much about versions or anything really..."

//so?

"You know, we need like a... documentation of some kind, for ourselves"

//so the code you're asking would be obsolete immediately, there're new changes everyday,
//it's better if you request an access for the repo and refer to a specific version from there if you want to document it,
//we can't compare the copy of the code if something went "not as you would have liked it",
//the documentation would be confusing as the code it's referring to is not the correct source of truth

"Hmmm, yeah, requesting repo access would require a some kind of a strong reason to be approved, besides it's gonna take a while, and it's not about comparing really, its just..., so that we have a copy of the code for our own... documentation"

//(I smell bs) well the argument stands, the code is going nowhere, it's there in the repo, if you would like a copy, request an access for the repo, and you can read/copy/document it all you like from there,

*then it goes for 20 more minutes of roundabout pleas about "documentations" and "having a copy of the code" with other colleagues before the guy gave up and went to think about requesting repo access,

In the rules, repo access is restricted for developer only, except for those with good and acceptable reason can have one, and requesting an access requires some strong reasoning and quite a lengthy procedure for non developer,

Until today, I still can't figure out the context/motive behind the request 🙃

Probably some bs they tried to pull, again,

He put just a zip in the new branch. I thought it was going to be the actual fucking project like I asked him to. Nope just a damn zip for me to extract and push to github correctly

Fucking hell

My friend brought me a simple python problem. He expected the output to be 2,2,3... instead of 2,3... I didn't know python, but with a quick tweak to differentiate the two prints, I understood that the range() function is exclusive.

Before coming to me, he asked his senior dev & that guy just said - "Oh, your editor has a problem". 😐

I, (a British developer), just had to explain how American Zip Codes work to my US-based colleague...

So this happened a few days ago. I always want to root my smartphones for that little bit more control.

*Put's new smartphone into fastboot mode*
*Tries to flash root zip onto it*
"You have to OEM unlock the bootloader first"
*OEM unlocks the bootloader*
*Tries to flash but fails*
*Tries to reboot*
Phone: "The bootloader has been tampered with, the device will boot in 5 seconds".
*Screen just hangs there for ages*
FUCK.
*Tries to enter fastboot again to OEM re-lock the bootloader*
*Fastboot appears to startup RIGHT AFTER THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE so can't boot into that anymore*.
FUCKING FUCK.
Hmm... TWRP is still installed...
*Tries to flash some stuff through TWRP*
"The zip file you are trying to flash is corrupt".
FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
*Connects phone to Linux for adb flashing*
*Nothing happens after half an hour of trying*
*Connects phone to ancient windows 7 laptop*
*Laptop doesn't even RECOGNISE the phone although all drivers are installed*.
*Le me about to completely lose my fucking mind*
*Connects phone desperately with Linux again*
*Phone is recognised right away but the SPL flash tool can't detect it*
*Tries to put it into fastboot again*
*Fails for about an hour*
*phone in charging mode again*
*Presses the power button for a last, desperate attempt*
*SPL flash suddenly recognises the phone*
FLASHING
FLASHING
FLASHING
DONE.
*Android boots again like nothing happened*

I can use it again like normal but the No-Root firewall is draining my battery like crazy.
That was one hell of a journey though!

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

!rant

As a kid I tried to compress one zip file 4-5 times...self praising myself that I just found the world's best idea to save hard-disk space!!! Only to realise that sometimes, I'm stupid.

I hate father's day.

Reminds me of 2 things:

1. My father is a fucking asshole.
2. My ex wife makes it damn near impossible for me to speak to my oldest child. State seems to do the same shit ever other state does to mothers that do this: nothing, zip, nada.

Fuck today.

I just got four CSV reports sent to me by our audit team, one of them zipped because it was too large to attach to email.

I open the three smaller ones and it turns out they copied all the (comma separated) data into the first column of an Excel document.

It gets better.

I unzip the "big" one. It's just a shortcut to the report, on a network share I don't have access to.

They zipped a shortcut.

Sigh. This'll be a fun exchange.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.

They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.

A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.

And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.

They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.

This is what happens when you have business people develop code.

So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.

So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).

The guy didn't reply to me anymore.

Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it...

"First remove the break points, and then commit the code".

He described it as if the breakpoints could stop time!! 😂

So day 2 of my python automations.

I have spent 6 hours and a lot of stack overflow “research” to saved myself 45 minutes a day with file downloads (web & ftp and outlook emails), excel spreadsheets and data manipulation macros, all stored in a nice tidy zip file at the end.

Now to find a way to send to a web server for digestion 😎

And all of this in a poor 90 lines 😧

God damn why didn’t I look into this earlier?

A day in the life of BoyBiscuit.

PM: Please zip up any local changes and push them to a temp folder on the repo and I will manually check to see what you have changed.
Me: *glaring at the download as zip button*

PM: Who broke the repo?
Me: *checks commit history*
Commit History: *last commit PM*

Me: Could you add the files to your commit before pushing because you've only pushed changes on tracked files.
PM: No not possible, I did 'commit -a'.
Me: ....

PM: Could you all delete your forks so that It isn't anywhere on the web
US: but it's private with only us as collaborators
PM: No because I can see it
Me: srysly?

PM: Could everyone try to write more effective code?
Me: Looks at his code
Code: Boolean b = getbooleanVal ? True : False;

Tl;Dr: PM doesn't know anything about git or working as a team.

See you tomorrow!

What happens when you push corn into a stack?

Client called the office in an angry voice complaining about how he could nog see the data in the latest generated excel sheets. Calmy tryimg to figure out what could be the problem. Asked him to send over the file so I could check it. Works perfect on my end. Ask him to open the file again on his computer and tell me what he is seeing. Error message, empty excel file. He starts to me discribing a directory full of files and folders. 15 minutes later I finally figuren out what it is.

The guy had set winzip as default program for excel files. Hoe do these people work behind a PC Evert day. Are they like I hope this magic box with screen and buttond does everything right today.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

Users: “Maybe I can just download these 3 PDFs in a single zipped file, that’d be nice.”

Android: “You got that buddy!”

Apple: “Animoji! 🐵”

This guy though.

So. I’m developing a program using Linux. The “Communications manager” of this company wants it done by Friday. I get it done by Thursday and push the source to Git, and email him the compiler. In a zip. A zip. On Linux. /r/madlads
Friday comes, this happens.
define string $ME, $CM
$CM: I’m very angry where is it! The thing you sent me doesn’t open!
$ME: Yeah, that’s the compiler, the source is on the git link I sent you in the email.
$CM: What git link? I need it today!
$ME: Open the email.
$CM: oh right 😅
Saturday.
$CM: I downloaded it unzipped it and the compiler still doesn’t open!!!!!!!!!!¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡!!!!!!!!!1111111
$ME: *sigh* Use the command line.
$CM: What’s that?
$ME: /* Okay, they don’t know the command line. This won’t be to hard. */ What OS do you use?
$CM: Windows.
$ME: Open start, type cmd and hit return.
$CM: Oh no! The hacking window when glitches happen came up! It says C:\USERS\$CM.name\>!
$ME: *sighhhh* Where is the file stored?
$CM: On my desktop in a folder called work_resources.
$ME: type chdir C:\USERS\$CM.name\Desktop\work_resources\
$CM: ok
$ME: type compile.bat [blah blah blah stuff about my program]
$CM: ok— OH NO ITS DELETING MY COMPUTER HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
$ME: It’s not! I wrote that program it’s fine!
$CM: Well ok whatever it did it finished.
$ME: Close the cmd and then go to the folder, go to builds and then double click 0015-[date].exe.
$CM: It’s got a weird window with weird symbols in it… then normal text “build library”
$ME: Uh…
$CM: You wrote the program for this and you don’t know how it works? Your so bad!!
$ME: … well…
$CM: Fix it!
threeHoursLater();
$ME: Okay I’m remoted in and —
$CM: Aah! The virus you installed erased my wallpaper and a hacker is controlling my mouse!
$ME: No that’s me.
$CM: wow your such a good hacker well done!
$ME: well let’s take a look here —
His folder is full of thousands of files. I go into the folder and my remote software crashes.
$CM: There’s a blue screen with a sad face.
$ME: /* I shoulda known this from the beginning, his pc is from 1998 and he’s running like a million programs on it. On windows 10. */ I’ll email it later. Bye!
Nearly done, guys.
10 minutes later.
No caller id.
$ME: Hello?
$???: *creepy whispers* give us your file now.
$ME: *hangs up*
Weird. Anyway, I did email it to him and he says it works now. I think it took more than one program and compiled it. I still don’t know about the creepy whispers, I forget if you can edit rants on devRant, if not I’ll send an update via comment. That’s the end of this rant, I included the creepy whispers because it asked about a file and I was doing stuff for that guy so yeah. ✌️

DATA COMMUNICATION BETWEEN SERVER AND AN APP..

1. Write all data into files,
2. Make the files as zip,
3. Send the zip to server,
4. Server will unzip the zip file,
5. Read all the data line by line from the files and update the data.

** TRUST ME, THIS IS A PRODUCTION APP I HAVE SEEN FROM A CLIENT **

Description of a Bug in JIRA:
Hi guys, there is "another" bug :-))))))!!!! :-((( with the customer list:
- The list of Customers (**which one? we have 4 fucking lists **) is sorted by Name, not by Birthday date (**wait, it's a sortable table, with a sortable name, city ,zip column, it's not sorted by birthday because the birthday column was not even required **)
- If I click on the details I see some data missing (**which data? which customer? there are thousands of them and most work**)
- In addition the arrow on the right is too small, can you make it a little bigger (**excuse me**)?
- I also need to export everything in excel.

Categorised as: Bug

Moron. You are part of a League of Morons...

to FUCKING .zip || .tar.gz TERRORISTS

HOW THE FUCK I NEED TO KNOW THIS FUCKING ARCHIVE IS GONNA EXPLODE OR NOT?

PLEASE FUCKING ARCHIVE FILES IN SEPARATE SINGLE FOLDER, NOT FILES ITSELF SHITHEADS

I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.

Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.

So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!

I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.

Who wants to unpack this RAR 😂😂

Am I the only one who hates cable management like this with zip ties? When one cable needs to be replaced you have to cut a bunch of zip ties and re-zip tie everything! Use Velcro!!!!!!
(I know it's not a dev rant but my old IT self came out)

Created a batch script to write some filenames to a text file using a loop.

Missed out the echo command, the script tries to open 100+ zip files on a production/potato server (I feel like prodtato should be a word).

Server cries and crashes
Dev cries and crashes

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

The project tech lead asks me to add some Docker configuration files sent by the client to a project. He gives me a zip file and I unzip it and add the files to Git. Job done.
Later he checks the commit and starts bitching because I unzipped the file and it should have been added as a zip. After much debate trying to explain to him that Docker wouldn't open the zip file to search for the Dockerfile he just says "Can you just do it? I double checked with the client!". I give up after giving him all the arguments why he is wrong and do it.
The next day the client checks the commit and comments bitching that I included the zip file and not the contents of it.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP

Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Created a zip file with Linux Mint Archive Manager ... Tried to send it to a collegue via Slack ...

asked the team to give us their API docs, they gave us the whole fuckin source code. in a zip file...
im outa here!! 😕

My first post here, be merciful please.

So, I participate in game jams now and then. About two years ago, I was participating in one, and we where near the deadline. Our game was pretty much done, so we where posted a "alpha" version waiting for feedback.

Just half an hour before the deadline, we got a comment on our alpha alerting us of a rather important typo: The instruction screen said "Press X to shoot" while X did nothing and Z was the correct key. "Good thing we caught that in time, thankfully a easy fix" I thought.

This project was written in python, and built using py2exe. If you know py2exe, the least error-prone method outputs a folder containing the .exe, plus ginormous amounts of dll's, pyc files, and various other crap. We would put the entire folder together with graphics and other resources into a .zip and tell the judges to look for the .exe.

Anyway, on this occasion I committed to source control ran the build, it seemed to work on my quick test. I uploaded the zip, right before the deadline and sat back waiting for the results.

I had forgotten one final step.

I had not copied my updated files to the zip, which still contained the old version.

Anyway, I ended up losing a lot of points in "user friendliness" since the judges had trouble figuring out how to shoot. After I figured out why and how it happened, I had a embarrassing story to tell my teammates.

I once worked with an obsessive tester who was bent on ‘testing’ the README file of a Software Distribution.

The README text file was in the distribution zip, so she had to unzip the thing before reading the file, however she insisted that her test result was a failure because there was no README that shows her how to unzip the distro to read the README!

I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious and escalated the ‘issue’ to the manager! I was furious, almost resigned from the project

In the end I had to suck it up and tolerated more weeks of her mindless obsession!

Windows: The only OS where downloading the zip is faster than extracting it.

Today I continued working on my File Encryption Frontend, nothing functional, yet!

The icons are selfmade, I think at least the folder icon is pretty.

Our programm will have something like a Zip-Explorer feeling too it, but our aim is still encrypting files to the unbreakable point.

I honestly don’t know how my coworker has been a software engineer for 10+ years, doesn’t know and or understand a single Linux command, only works from windows... also doesn’t understand the concept of proper version control ... thinks zip folders is completely sufficient... AND doesn’t understand why someone would need to refactor something... says it works... I’m like you have a 2000 line function... yes it works, but it’s not testable nor reusable... he says he’s tested it (at his desk) ... and so what if it’s not reuseable... he’ll copy and paste and rewrite something for another project. “That’s what we are paid todo” .... HORSESHIT!!!

I don’t understand how the system hasn’t weeded people out like this.... and he blindly doesn’t want to take criticism, or learn.. saying his Years of experience proves he knows what he’s doing... bullshit

I’m just happy management is on my side.

Has anyone ever ordered off RedBubble? Are they even a legitimate company?

Rant...

20 days ago I ordered a package from redbubble.com

They shipped the package, without an apartment number. So the delivery was refused and it was sent back to them.

I reach out to support and they ask me to send them a complete mailing address and my order number.

I send them my exact mailing address and the order number as they requested. They inform me that the package is being sent out again ASAP.

This morning I see that the new package has shipped, WITH NO FUCKING APARTMENT NUMBER.

I email them to let them know this. They inform me that since it has my zip code it will be fine (which is a ridiculously stupid this to say).

So I actually call the post service and ask them if the address will work, they let me know that of course, it will not get to me if there is no apartment. Duh!

So, I email RedBubble support again to let them know this.

I expect some sort of answer as to why this is happening. But the following happens.

They send me a refund.

Let's be clear, I did not as for a refund. I asked for the order I made to be shipped to me.

So it seems that putting an apartment number on a shipping address is completely impossible for this very unprofessional company.

After 2 weeks of bullshit, I will be receiving nothing at all from these shady cunts.

Fuck RedBubble it seems.

Learned over Xmas, my brother-in-law works at a company with NO CENTRALIZED VERSION CONTROL. They just... pass around zip files of the latest code? Or something? Like jfc, even as a student we at least used TortoiseSVN!

I was ok with their marriage last summer, but now I feel that my sister deserves better. Can't imagine a company like that attracts the best and brightest. Here's hoping he actually exceeds the expectations, and leads the company into a glorious, gitty future.

No bloddy fucking way !
I cant be believe it !
I ported LineageOS to device that newer saw LineageOS support so port from scratch basically.
So i did that. The build was done in 1 day with tiny amount of patches on top of what was in repos already. Basically patches only to build it.
I got the zip and all that jam but i put it away since i believed that it woudlnt boot as its first build ever of LineageOS for this device.
Today i had to factory reset my device since AOSP10 fucked up data partition so i thought that maybe i could flash lineage just to see where we stand.
I flash it.
Reboot.
I see sony screen.
Then black.
OK.
Wait what ?
LineageOS boot anim shows up.
Does the pass 3 times and shows me the final image of boot animation basically telling me it booted up.
OK in my head i was like OK but the UI wont load. There is no way.
I look away at my friend we have been talking with while this happened.
I look at device and see the device fully booted to LineageOS intro screen.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ? HOW? WHY? WHAT ?
(I totally wasnt screaming like a girl and dancing in the room when this happened. NOOO)
We were joking with the devs on different devices that it would be fun if the first build booted up since it required only 2 patches to build properly.
When i told them that the first ever build booted up they were going nuts as i was.
To be clear.
Porting usually takes hours of debugging to even get it to boot up.
Sureee not everything works as is expected. So whats broken ?
Camera, Bluetooth, NFC, Audio (Already building a fix), flashlight.
So there is fair bit of debugging still left but once audio is working then basic functions basically work and i can use the phone daily without trouble and as backup i have my old phone until rest is fixed.
This is the best day of the year i must say.

Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"

(spoiler: YES)

My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.

The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?

Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.

For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.

The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.

In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.

I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!

Online applications are so much worse than the classic snail mail ones, because some companies just don't seem to give a single fuck about the quality of their application application (hehe).

This results in such joyous things like:

• "Allowed file types: doc, docx, pdf, jpg, zip"
• "Max filesize 3mb"
• "One of your files does not meet the requirements" (doesn't tell you which)
• "Upload timed out, please try again"
• 403 forbidden
• "Your account does not have the necessary permissions to upload more than 4 files at once"
• clicking the submit button leads to a 404
• "Please explain why you want to work for us." 500 character limit
• Google forms

.rar - made by winrar
.zip - made by microsoft (i think)
.personalinformation - made by google

I'm fucking done with all these online systems that prioritize fancy shit over functionality. I ordered two fleet enemas, a pack of lubes, and some medication online because "somehow" I guess people are experimenting with those due to the pandemic and they are always out of stock. Weird boredom but okay.

So this site gave me two options - deliver it straight to my door or deliver it to the nearby pharmacy. I thought, "Wow, how convenient." Home deliveries aren't allowed anyway, might as well pick it up from the store that's always open instead of getting my door dick-banged by the security guard in an inconvenient time.

I chose the "deliver to the nearby pharmacy" option and they gave me a map where I would enter my zip code and it will search for it. I entered my zip code, didn't work. Entered my street address, didn't work. I zoomed into the fucking map and manually tried to point to the pharmacy's location. It's right there! I clicked it.

"ERROR. Please select the store."

Clicked it again.

"ERROR. Please select the store."

Again and again and again. I gave up and chose home delivery. Who the fuck developed this shit? Why would you put an option that doesn't work? The time you spent making it fancy should have been spent actually making it work. Give me a list of branches, I'll be happy to go through it and select the store. Hell, I'll give you the coordinates of the store. Not the most efficient way but at least it works.

How much time of our lives have been wasted to the promise of "convenience" only to get disappointed in the dumbest way possible? It's a small thing but damn, it's so small, it shouldn't even exist. That's what she said.

PM emails me a zip file with the message "Can you give the attached a look and get it to work. See email below that there are some items missing to make it run."

Items missing : 3 custom libraries, 2 sql databases, 3 custom sql tables, and oh yeah the license to the program it runs on.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

My company took over a project that was previously sent overseas . (PHP, laravel 5.1) so I was pointed a lead developer in this project, when I emailed the "senior developer " from the previous company about version control and code documentation. He assured me there was nothing to worry about . ... I found 450 line methods without comments and as version control I found zip files with dates as the name ... fML this is gonna be a long summer

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

I had to set up a Raspberry Pi just to display a webpage since it is inexpensive and I didn't have enough budget to get a case for it so I present my homemade case. Lol. It's zip tied to the box within another box.

I’ve started at a new place - the team use Trello to share code 😳They are happy to zip a folder, upload and download each time a project is updated.

I’ve tried to sell the benefits of Git however some have such conviction that it would be worse. FML.

Zip file back-ups for version control ??? And, more people do that over Mercurial ???

I wonder if I should open source CZip....
It saves data usage of streaming movies.
2hr movie = about 500mb data usage

I will never forget that screenshot of a corrupt jar file viewed in 7-Zip containing something with a compressed size of 19 bytes, which would result in more than 1 TB uncompressed
Things like these are why I'm still breathing

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

I'm getting really tired of those dumbass programmers that do not understand shit and then come to me when production breaks. (I am also a programmer, not really a DevOps engineer, but I'm the least worst at DevOps stuff, so it's my job...).

We're programming some kind of document management tool. Today we had a release, and one of the new features is to download all of your documents as a zip file, which is asynchronuously generated. When it's done, the user gets a mail with the download link to the zip file.

The feature works basically, but today it broke our production service, as somebody was running a test of it.

Turns out all the documents are loaded into memory to be zipped. So if you have 2 gigs of documents, a container with memory restrictions in that area will crash.

I asked the programmer who reported this «ops problem» to me, why he didn't just shit the files into a temp foler in order to zip them in there.

He told me that he wanted to do so, but did not know how to mock this for a unit test, and therefore went to the in-memory «solution», which was easier for him to mock.

For fuck's sake, unit tests and mocks are fucking tools, not ends in itself! I don't give a fuck about your pointless mocking code when the application crashes!

When I got to deal with such dumbasses, I'd prefer to mock those motherfuckers with a leaky bucket of liquid shit, which basically accomplishes the same task from my perspective: dripping shit all over the place and make everything suck as fuck.

Somebody here that still remembers zip drives? And that 250mb was more than you would ever need?

I heard dropdown zip codes are the new fad..

Fucking tired of clients sharing projects as .zip on gdrive

Stackoverflow's new help 😂😂

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

PM: Zip up the prototype and push it to a temporary folder on the master git repo.
Me: *twitch*

Last Week Friday:
PM: We'll be taking you off the one project on to another, we'll send the details later.
Me: Cool

*Hours Later*

PM: Ok cool, so you'll be looking at a script that one of our Pillar heads has scripted. You need to make sure it works and that it can run on the server.
Me: *I always thought this guy was useless now i get to see what he can do* Cool, just send the documentation and i'll take a look at it over the weekend. Just tell me when you've sent it.
PM: Cool.
Project Head: I'll inform you when i send the files and how to run them.
Me: *I know how to set up a database locally, i'm not an idiot* Cool.

Whole Weekend I don't get a single message.

Monday Morning:
Project Head(PH): Have you taken a look at it yet?
Me: Taken a look at what?
PH: The Database and the Script
Me: i didn't get any message over the weekend.
PH: I sent it yesterday, it should be in your inbox.
Me: There's Nothing. Sending anything on a Sunday is expecting me not to see it, especially at 10pm. Besides i can't retrieve any of the files in the attachment(Outlook tripping), rather send it in a zip file or upload it to onedrive.

PH sends the link. I get the files, set up the DB, glance at the script.

Me: This is actually interesting.
PH: You know what it does?
Me: My SQL knowledge is below average but i can read and understand it pretty well. So your dynamically copying the database from the server to the warehouse, cool.
It's not going to work though.
PH: Check first.

I check it

Me: Doesn't work, but it sort of works.
PH: What do you mean?
Me: Some tables are populated but some aren't,, how and there's a shit tone of errors.
PH: So i does copy the data over.
Me: Some of the data.
PH: test it on the Server
Me: Not a good idea.
PH: Just try it.
PM: In the mean time i'll send you some documentation i need you to review and edit.
Me: *Idiots* Cool.

Tuesday:
Me: Have you checked it on the server yet?
PH: Not yet, busy.
Me: Where's the documentation again?
PM: I'll send it it a moment.
Me: In the mean time i'll write some script to fix that script that's definitely not going to work.

Wednesday:
Boss: I heard you done with the script
Me: It's not done, but we'll be testing it on the server later.
Boss: Then why are you running it on the server?
Me: Ask the PH and PM.
Boss: What are you doing now?
Me: Well i'm supposed to do documentation *looks at PM* but i haven't recieved any yet, so I've been writing a script to fix the copy script.
PH: Ok we'll test when the boss leaves, after all the meetings.
PM: here's the documentation.
Me: Thanks

I start on documentation.

PH: It didn't work.
Me: I know.
PH: Fix it.

Thursday:
Meeting.
PM: What you doing?
Me: Fixing the script,
PM: Do the documentation first
Me: Cool.

End of the day:
PH: Why you doing the documentation? The script has highest priority.
Me: Ask the PM.

Friday(Today):
Boss: can we talk.
Me: Sure.
Boss: I though you said the script was done?
Me: i said it sort of works, just doesn't do the job 100%.
Boss: Monday i was told it's done.
Me: i only looked through it Monday to understand it, i done nothing before Tuesday. though i have been trying to create a script to fix it.
Boss: Your working really slow hey.
Me: *It's been a week, and stupid people are in charge* I was doing what i was told.
Boss: Cool.(His Upset)

Stupid FUCKEN people, make stupid FUCKEN decisions. But Hey, the boss only see's the final result. I am a human being, even i make mistakes. But there's a huge gap between stupidity and a mistake.

We can hide messages in images via steganography (or ZIP sewing), we can hide messages in sound via either sound-based transmission (like Morse) or waveform-based transmission (think oscilloscope art videos), we can transmit it in videos in like 300 different fucking combined forms...

Encryption isn't the ONLY way, yo. Social engineering and being a cheeky shithead can get it done too.

story time:
I use onedrive for sharing some files and shit. So one day one of my folders, which I got from a downloaded zip, caused an error "files couldn't be synced because of unallowed character in the title".
Turns out there was a space at the end of the folder title. I change the name, I get some error.
"Okay, no problem, I don't need that folder anymore anyway" So I delete it, doesn't work, the error message reads "Can't delete folder because it no longer exists.". "What the hell" try deleting it some more. Emptying it before deleting. Deleting the parent folder. I try formatting it before deleting. Nothing works.
Deleting from the online onedrive client causes it to briefly disappears but refreshing places it back right where it came from.

So I resort to my last hope, customer support.
I explain the whole thing.

I get a reply. Oh boy.

I get explained that if the recycle bin is full, the file will be placed back.
After that, I get an explanation on how to remove a file xD

Thanks OneDrive Team, really helpful.

File hosting like GitHub?

Basically.. I want to let my Patreons download major updates to my game before I upload them to Github. Now, I will get a GitHub Developer upgrade once I get $7+ per month from Patreon, and host the updates on a private repository for a few days before uploading it to my main dev repository, but I something until then. Some place I can host the loose files, or a .zip at a static link for free. (that can only be accessed by that link) ^~^

2 days ago I realized that I met Abraham Lempel (from the ziv-lempel/zip compression) in person, and didn't figure out it's the same Lempel

I am become gradle
destroyer of builds
look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair

Why can't zip/tar tasks work like copy tasks? Whyyyyyyy?

I got it working--abusing tasks.create--but hot damn this should be easier.

This is a story of how I did a hard thing in bash:

I need to extract all files with extension .nco from a disk. I don't want to use the GUI (which only works on windows). And I don't want to install any new programs. NCO files are basically like zip files.

Problem 1: The file headers (or something) is broken and 7zip (7z) can only extract it if has .zip extension

Problem 2: find command gives me relative to the disk path and starts with . (a dot)

Solution: Use sed to delete dot. Use sed to convert to full path. Save to file. Load lines from file and for each one, cp to ~/Desktop/file.zip then && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oOutputDir (Extract file to OutputDir).

Problem 3: Most filenames contain a whitespace. cp doesn't work when given the path wrapped in quotes.

Patch: Use bash parameter substitution to change whitespace to \whitespace.

(Note: I found it easier to apply sed one after another than to put it all in one command)

Why the fuck would anyone compress 345 images into their own archive used by an uncommon windows-only paid back-up tool?
Little me (12 years old) knowing nothing about compression or backup or common software decided to use the already installed shitty program.

This is a big deal for me because it's really the first time I string so many cool commands to achieve desired results in bash (been using Ubuntu for half a year now). Funny thing is the images uncompressed are 4.7GB and the raw files are about 1.4GB so I would have been better off not doing anything at all.

Full command:
find -type f -name "*.nco" |
sed 's/\(^./\)/\1/' |
sed 's/.*/\/media\/mitiko\/2011-2014_1&/' > unescaped-paths.txt

cat unescaped-paths.txt | while read line; do echo "${line// /\\ }" >> escaped-paths.txt; done

rm unescaped-paths.txt

cat escaped-paths.txt | while read line; do (echo "$line" | grep -Eq .*[^db].nco) && echo "$line" >> paths.txt; done

rm escaped-paths.txt

cat paths.txt | while read line; do cp $line ~/Desktop/file.zip && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oImages >/dev/null; done

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

Yes, I have to admit, sometimes Linux is a F*KING B*TCH.

I was supposed to fucking format a pc for a close friend of mine, cause he produces music and win 10 fucked his machine up with its broken updates.

Knowing the guy is a talent I promised that by 7PM the pc would be fixed.

Not really, I'm feeling the stupidest guy in this fucking earth, cause I've been here for 2 hours, fucking trying to extract an ISO image, and nothing on this fucking planet seems to work.

Tried the graphical archives, none open de ISO, tried 7z, it gives me an error, tried fuseiso, which is recommended in Arch Linux' documentations. Doesn't work. Tried mount - o my file.iso /mnt and it says /mnt isn't in the fstab file which makes me even angrier cause I always mount everything there without editing shit. So I installed 7-zip for windows in wine, it extracts until 90% and freezes. Now I'm trying hsuebrirbwkwpxjhw9shrbejejwke and my mouth is foaming and my ear is bleeding my brains out and I don't need you shit.

Fuck you, Fuck your goddamn ISO and Fuck this faggot ass spell checker, that changes Fuck to duck and assign to asset.

Fuck it, I ain't gonna format anyones pm anymore.

You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM.

IDK if im crazy or i kind of got used to it that i run all bleeding edge.

Classmates call me crazy but i think its OK to run latest shit always. I mean new features and fixes and all that crap. Sure stuff breaks but well what an Arch linux user would i be if i didnt have a Arch Linux USB in my pocket always right ? (Yes i do have Arch linux always with me). Just boot into that and revert to latest working version. Its isnt that hard really. And i mean stuff breaks only sometimes and thats really not often tbh.

So yeah. Compiling grub-git as i write this rant just because my amd-ucode file isnt detected by grub in arch repos.

Yes arch packages are sometimes fucked up really well but on the other hand it isnt hard to use AUR to download them.

And please dont for fuck sake use AUR helpers. Just download the fucking zip. Unzip. and makepkg -si it really isnt hard and its just better this way.
Yes more work for you but the system doesnt break that often.

I was explaining client that it’s not secure to use zip code as a password for users authentication, and we should use something else.

So they write me an email, that we should not use password at all, and login only with username (10 digit long number).

It’s interesting how they think: if it’s not secure, then don’t use it at all.

Epic code fight broke out today when one developer fronted himself for leader due to having beat all the metrics by a factor of ten. Claimed he could replace the entire department based on LOC alone.

Another developer told him to fucking zip it.

After almost coming to blows someone managed to explain to him that he had to put his code into a compressed archive.

As it compressed to ten times smaller than the next smallest contribution he declared victory because his compressed better. Another developer joked better call bomb squad.

Wrote a small fix to some css and asked the production guy to pull it...

Prod: pull what?
Me: the prod branch.
Prod: from where?
Me: the only git server we have.
Prod: Oh yea let me go and download the zip, give me like 5 minutes I need to open chrome.
Me: (smh)

He's been unpacking copies of the prod branch by hand for months

I'm doing a job for an advertising agency together with a designer and he sent a few mockups to the client without copying me or telling me he was doing it at all.

Then, suddenly, I receive a 1.5GB zip with a message saying: "client approved, here's everything".

Now I'm really pissed-off because:

- He told me he sent everything, but no images for headers, no text, nothing, nada besides the placeholders on the PSDs;
- It was 1.5gb for only 7 mockups (all other screens I think I'll have to get by osmosis);
- Designer and the client don't know shit about HTML/CSS/WordPress and took tons of decisions without consulting me (lots of impossible features);
- These mockups should've been sent to me last week because...;
- ...he **fucking promised** the client I'd deliver the project by Apr. 2nd;

But what leaves me pretty pissed off about it is that Mar. 30th is my birthday and, also, it's holiday in Brazil (Passion of Christ).

I'm not that religious, but I really wanted to rest and forget about the stress that's been building up in the last 3 months thanks to (not really) "good" work.

I'm pretty sure this prick and the client will spend this "extended" weekend somewhere having fun and resting while I'll have to build this piece of crap.

FML, for real.

I should have done something REALLY bad in a previous life to receive this.

So it seems that lately I got addicted to minimalistic wallpapers, they just look soo nice on both desktop and mobile devices.

Anyone recommends any good zip file with a bunch of those?

*some websites will do the job too

*Cheers*

When "Programmers" don't understand how something as simple as git works.

>Do they keep whole repository in a zip file for each commit? Having made 100 commits is there 100 zips with all the files? or is each commit additive to the first commit. so that 1 zip with all the files you just get files added or removed based on what commit you are downloading?

Stuff like this makes me cry.....
-commit 1GB file
-commit another 1GB file
Repo is now 3GB? Seems legit right?

> be me
> be developing a react native app
>realize the iPhone X notch is clipping your content on the first/home screen of the app
>google says: simple fix
>find a built-in react native thing to add safe area padding
> refresh the app
> ohno.png
> the other screens with navigation bars already have built in padding
> TOOMUCHPADDING.jpeg
> remove safe area thingy
> finds a clever, not particularly hacky way to pad the home screen without showing the header bar by setting its height to 0 and the color to match the content background
> more-problems.app
> there’s a small 1–pixel light colored line separating the header from the content clearly breaking the otherwise continuous single color background
> google.sh
> wtf.txt
> stackoverflow.html
> no responses except something I’d already done
> keep experimenting
> tries basically everything to figure out where that line is coming from
>sets borders to thicccc and bright red
>no bottom border? Ok that’s not it
>opacity?
>forgetaboutit.mov
>try shifting the header position around by a few pixels? Maybe it’s misaligned with the white parent layer underneath?
> nope.jpg
>it’s past bedtime
>Sleep.jpg
>thenextday(today).zip
> what about the content? Is that misaligned?
> nope2.jpg
>Maybe its an iOS feature not a react thing?
> make a test Xcode project, completely native to test
> negative.dng (pun intended)
> more-furious-googling.mp3
> find a native iOS stackOverflow question with the same issue (1px line)
> realize your Xcode test wasn’t done properly.
>atleastimmakingprogress.iso
> start looking into the SO post
>it’s native so I have to find out how to do it in react-native
>invent a bunch of style parameters that don’t exist in the documentation to see if there’s an undocumented thing
>loadsaloadsaerrors.log
>googles for a react native version of the iOS only SO post
> somethingpromising.tar.gz
> *tries it*
> “Haha nope” -my code
> whataboutthisotherthing.bin
> KENSISHSBUCNEGWISBVSIDNRVSIDNFIRJRBDKFNFIDJFIFKFNR
> HOLY FUCK
> IT WORKED
> AFTER TWO FUCKING DAYS OF SHITTERY AND SHENANIGANS
>AND MANY STACKOVERFLOW EDITS TO A NOW VERY MESSY POST
>THEREISNOMOREBORDER(final).zip
>*screams of relief*

That feeling when you ask someone to send you an archived files and he/she sends you *.rar file, not *.tar.gz, not *.zip.

My company provides its services as web pages and web services to our customers.

Once a year we update the certificate used for the https connections.

I notified the update to the clients that use the web services.

One of them asked me a copy of the public key.

No problem. Open the web site with the browser, save the key and send by email.

One day later the client asked me the public key in a zip file because the anti virus blocked my attachment.

Why the client hates the Chain of Trust ?
He could obtain the public key by them self from the browser or openssl.

"Showing the user a number pad to enter in a zip code will cause some confusion, we should use a full keyboard instead"

Aws Lambda and serverless framework. Yes FaaS is cool. Love it. But it is pain in ass when you have the only way for you deploy is zip the fucking code with all the dependencies. Comm'on AWS you can do better. Look at azure functions. Please give me a git deployment support. Please I beg. Each test iteration takes like for ever. Also no proper local emulator. Fuck you AWS. Fuck you serverless.

Goddamn livid right now.

Our 3rd party Vendor developers' couldn't figure out how to check-in their goddamn code to our GitHub branch so they just sent our PM a zip file via email containing the project with the node modules folder too!!

Wtf.

Why are we even giving them a dollar. 😤😲

TIL WinMerge can compare a folder against a zip

Randomly grabbed a open source project off github (zip didn’t use git. Didn’t wanna accidentally request a merge with my garbage code) after talking to the developer on discord about a feature I thought would be cool and he welcomed me to try adding it since he was busy bug fixing the latest release
Never seen the language before in my life (before I started college) and egotistically assumed I’d be able to learn enough to add what I wanted. I was horribly wrong. The farthest I got was potentially understanding how I’d be able to add it as well as getting a placeholder checkbox for the feature in the options form

Soon got discouraged and zipped up what I attempted and put it in my code graveyard on my archive hard drive for a future attempt

10 years ago my bosses came to me: Make a few adjustments to the logic of this website. Should be a quick thing they said. Got a zip file later. Hundreds of php files. Inside, thousands of lines of the best PHP/HTML Spaghetti I've ever seen. No CSS though, but lots of nested table layouts. The best part: everything was in french, content, comments, varnames. The original dev didn't use includes for the most repetitive stuff, even db credentials were copied in every file. Took me a week.

Two weeks later: Change that and that please....

We decided to write everything from scratch then.

Just finished a project for a client who couldn't even create a .zip of the images she wanted me to use.. /.- just to say it took longer to finish than it should have

Why are there no good file managers for Linux?

Come to think of it, why are there no good file managers that aren't Windows Explorer?

All I want is a good breadcrumb bar (editable), customizability, basic functions such as permanent delete, open folder with, etc, and built in zip reading. Is that too much to ask?

Currently I use the elementary OS one (works a bit better than the default nautilus) but it lacks a ton of basic functionality and there's pretty much no customization.

Please someone make a usable file manager for Linux. Ugh

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

You fucking piece of shit, how do I get you to work, I literally installed all libraries, 7-zip, everything, fucking work already

Okay okay, who really uses vim? I can barely finish vimtutor.

It’s dope but I don’t know if I could see myself doing any sort of web development efficiently on it.

Seems like it would take a solid month to be able to zip around.

I had a client who wanted me to install a php project from github on a live server. I agreed to do it for $10. I set it up and it showed the setup page. so I left it there and thought this is probably how far the client wants me to go.
But then he asked me to go through the setup and completely install it. I was like ehh..ok I will do it.
But then came the shit storm of bugs in that project's installation module. Had to run through a gazzillion issues on github. Eventually I gave up.
Then I tried installing it on my localhost and surprisingly it installed fine. So I just made a zip and uploaded it to the server.
2 other devs had failed to get the job done before me. I t felt really good to get the job done.
The client tipped me an extra $5 too.

=)

Semantic what?

"mmx-a00112-bwt-1.6.2e_dirtyPatch_withoutCityTours_startpageHack_2.zip"

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

7-zip fucked me over real bad today.

It decompressed 30 gigs of data (about half an hour), from a deeply compressed bz2 archive, then decided to throw an error and delete the decompressed data.

...

There goes my ambition for working on my side project

once I downloaded a zip from MediaFire from an "idiot kid" (you know the kind) and I opened it. The format was invalid. I open it in notepad and guess what? IT'S A FUCKING RAR FILE! so I rename the extension to rar, lo and behold, yeet, it works. Don't trust idiot kids. ever.

Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.

He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.

This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.

Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”

*sigh*

And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”

The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.

I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.

What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.